Today, I want to talk to you about Service Availability.  I’ve seen it used sporadically in places, but never very well.  Now, before I get into the meat of the topic, let me explain why this part of the process should be very important to your business.  Just as in sales, knowing if all of the components are available is extremely important to managing your workload.  SAP provides the same availability functionality in the service order as it does in the production (except of course, running it in mass…  but for that, check out Proximity by JaveLLin Solutions.).  Transaction IWBK is a good transaction to show you all of the availability associated with a service order, and it even gives you traffic lights to let you know at a glimpse if everything is available.  In addition, the status of the service order itself lets you know if all components are available.

Now, you may be asking, why do I care?  Often you have a decent workload of service orders and you require components in order to begin work on them.  Wouldn’t it be nice to see at a glance if all the components are available to know if you should start working on the order?  Perhaps you released the order to get some MRP requirements out there for parts.  Well, if you don’t know when the parts are available, how do you know when you can start working on the order?  Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for getting this part back to the customer.  Your metrics look worse and worse, all because you don’t know if you have parts to start working on a repair.

Now, once you have performed your planning on the service orders, you need to make sure the availability check is configured the way you need it.  Just like the availability for sales and production orders, you can have a unique one for service (or more often you’ll use the same one that production uses).  If you are interested in more detail on configuring the availability check, please look for my new E-Book on configuring Service Orders.  This will provide an in-depth explanation of all the configuration necessary to properly configure the availability check.

To show you exactly how to execute the availability check, SAP only offers one place to execute availability.  IW32.

 

Press this button to execute availability.  There are several important system statuses that relate to availability:

MANC – Availability not checked
MSPT – Missing parts
MACM – All parts Available

If you use IW38/IW39 or Iw72/Iw73 and you look at system status, this will give you the quick look to determine if you have components available or not.  Please note, this doesn’t do a hard allocation of the components.  It simply says, based on the availability check (see above) that it is in stock.

Now, when you get the AVC running the way you want, your service group can use IW72/IW73 to effectively monitor what orders have components available.  The key thing to remember is that AVC is run on creation and release only.  Any additional AVC must be triggered manually, unless you use a utility, like the one included in the Proximity by JaveLLin Solutions, that allows you to check the availability in mass/batch.

I hope this little overview gives you an understanding why availability could be an important piece of service that you’ve overlooked.

I hope this lesson gave you some new pieces to think about.  In the next lesson we will talk about tracking your warranty data.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to reach out to me directly:

mpiehl@goJavellin.com